From Jonathan Kay, an open letter to The Guardian about Heather Mallick

Here’s a letter I fired off to The UK Guardian newspaper this afternoon:

My name is Jonathan Kay. I run the op-ed pages of Canada’s National Post newspaper. I’m a big fan of the Guardian, and I appreciate you taking the time to read this. Like all Canadians, I’m pleased when prominent publications in other countries take note of our little corner of the world. In this regard, I’ve noticed that the Guardian occasionally publishes columns about Canadian politics by Toronto writer Heather Mallick, who also happens to be a columnist for the Toronto Star. She is a lively stylist, and I can see why her writing would, at first blush, seem like a good fit for your outlet.

Unfortunately (and please understand that, as discussed below, I am writing this as a proud Canadian, not just as an editor at a competing newspaper), it also is well-known among Canadian media observers that Mallick’s columns are full of lurid and, in some cases, outright mendacious claims about our government. She is published in the Star as quasi-satire, not as a serious commentator on Canadian events. And I think you should know this if you continue to run her Guardian columns, which appear to be full of the same sort of irresponsible claims.

By way of example, a March 28 Toronto Star Mallick column claimed that Harper’s government is planning to “hunt down its enemies” in a manner that “verges on the Stalinist.” She also claimed — without any evidence — that Harper would eliminate all “government safety standards for food and medicine”; that Harper wants to put “guns on the street,” and institute a “system of academic McCarthyism.” Mallick’s May 3 Guardiancolumn (“Canada’s cold new dawn”) is written in this same spirit — particularly the last three paragraphs, which bear no resemblance to reality — and also reflect Mallick’s odd and disturbing habit of casting hateful references on those who don’t happen to live in large coastal cities.

This is part of a trend, because many parts of Mallick’s Guardian columns are essentially interchangeable slurs against what she insists, without any evidence, is a racist, misogynistic Canadian government populated by, and for, fat individuals who are simpletons because they don’t live in Toronto. In a 2010 Guardiancolumn, for instance, she wrote that: “[Canadian] Conservatives can’t stand people, particularly if they’re female, or second-generation Canadian, or educated, or principled, or not from Alberta, which is the home of the hard-right belly-bulging middle-aged Tory male.”

It’s not clear why you saw fit to print this. Bigotry flipped directly on its head is bigotry.

Of course, it is no crime to publish columns that are flat-out wrong — or even bigoted. But I doubt you do so knowingly. Just as I have only a limited idea of who is properly regarded as a mainstream pundit in the UK, you may be under the impression that Mallick is Canada’s answer to Robert Fisk or George Monbiot. Sadly, she’s not.

My newspaper, the National Post, is considered right-of-centre in its editorial posture. So one might imagine that I am speaking as a partisan here. But Canadian progressives also have been outraged by Mallick — because of the consistently hateful attitudes she has exhibited toward people who are poor or come from rural backgrounds. In 2008, for instance, she wrote a CBC column analyzing the popularity of Sarah Palin among “white trash” (her words) voters: “Palin has a toned-down version of the porn actress look favoured by this decade’s woman … Bristol has what is known in Britain as the look of the teen mum, the ‘pramface.’ Husband Todd looks like a roughneck; Track, heading off to Iraq, appears terrified. They claim to be family obsessed while being studiously terrible at parenting. What normal father would want Levi ‘I’m a fuckin’ redneck’ Johnson prodding his daughter?” (The column in question — one of a number of Mallick pieces that, somewhat bizarrely and obsessively, attempts to link right-wing attitudes to middle-aged sexual dysfunction — was removed from the CBC web site after numerous complaints, and Mallick flamed out of the CBC shortly thereafter. A CBC official described the piece as “viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan.”)

To reiterate, it is nice to see Canada written about in the opinion section of a media outlet as illustrious as The Guardian. But the image of Canada that Mallick peddles — a sort of fascistic hellhole — is one that no Canadian I know would actually recognize. And to the extent her words are meant as satire, I suspect no one in the UK gets the joke (few in Canada do, either, I should add; though her Star column is certainly a popular feature among those zealous Harper haters who take her views seriously).

I have gone on for a while here. So thanks for reading, assuming you are still with me. Why have I spent so much time writing this out? Consider for a moment how you would react if there were a single British journalist who was a regular on the op-ed pages of one of Canada’s newspapers. Now imagine that this writer regularly wrote dispatches, datelined from London, describing England as a land of demented plebes living under the jackboot of a near-“Stalinist” dictator.

You would probably object, right?

I would, too.

Oh, and if you are looking for mainstream Canadian voices to grace your pages, there are plenty. Without even naming National Post writers (for fear of appearing self-serving), I can suggest Margaret Wente of the Globe & Mail, Andrew Coyne of Maclean‘s magazine and Michael Coren of Sun Media. All are excellent writers. And the Canada they write about, unlike Mallick’s, is an actual place on planet earth.